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Henry Giroux on the Pathology of Politics in our Warfare State September 23, 2016 Editor’s note: Living as we do in the 15th year of the war that began with Afghanistan and Iraq and has now spread to Syria, Yemen, Libya, etc. it is sometimes possible for many of us to accept the militarization of our society as just normal. …

What happens to a society when thinking is eviscerated and is disdained in favor of raw emotion? [1] What happens when political discourse functions as a bunker rather than a bridge? What happens when the spheres of morality and spirituality give way to the naked instrumentalism of a savage market rationality? What happens when time becomes a burden for most people and surviving becomes more crucial than trying to lead a life with dignity? What happens when domestic terrorism, disposability, and social death become the new signposts and defining features of a society? What happens to a social order ruled by an “economics of contempt” that blames the poor for their condition and wallows in a culture of shaming?[2] What happens when loneliness and isolation become the preferred modes of sociality? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and is no longer able to connect personal suffering with larger social issues? What happens to thinking when a society is addicted to speed and over-stimulation? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers not just as an ideal but also as a reality, and individual and social agency become weaponized as part of the larger spectacle and matrix of violence?[3]

Today on The Gary Null Show, Gary opens up the program with the latest in health and healing, Gary shows you the health benefits of ginseng and almonds, how breast feeding is associated w/ better brain development. Gary covers topics with climate change. In the second half of the program Gary talks with guest Prof. Henry Giroux on How the US is at war with itself and why this is contributing to the growing authoritarianism in our domestic and foreign policies while sharing some commentaries. Professor Henry Giroux (Jeer-oh) holds the Global Television Network Chair of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Ontario Canada. He was previously the Waterbury Chair Professor at Penn State University and Director of the Forum in Education and Cultural Studies. Professor Giroux is a leader in the field of critical and public pedagogy which describes the nature of spectacle in our new media, body politic and corporate education. He is a prominent advocate of radical democracy, which opposes the powers of neoliberalism, corporatism, and religious fundamentalism that diminishes our sense of civic virtue, free-thought and well being. He has also been named among the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern Period. Henry has authored many and most recently “America at War with Itself”. His website is HenryAGiroux.com

The following is an excerpt from the new book The Myth of Human Supremacy [3] by Derrick Jensen (Seven Stories Press, 2016): “The modern conservative [and, I would say, the human supremacist] is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” —John Kenneth Galbraith I’m sitting by a pond, in …

Peter and Mickey spend the hour in conversation with author/educator Henry Giroux. Giroux explains the concept of ‘critical pedagogy,’ and the pivotal role that education plays for the whole of society. He warns of the increasing domination of the world by the ultra-rich, and a new form of anti-intellectualism fostered by a failing corporate media. Among the measures the left must take to resist these forces, he names the formation of a third political party, and more academics taking on the duties of public intellectuals, rather than confining themselves to the campus.

American society is morally bankrupt and politically broken, and its vision of the future appears utterly dystopian. As the United States descends into the dark abyss of an updated form of totalitarianism, the unimaginable has become imaginable in that it has become possible not only to foresee the death of the essential principles of constitutional democracy, but also the birth …

The following is an excerpt from the new book Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle [3] by Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux (City Lights Books, 2015): Despite the daily spectacles of violence to which we are all continually subjected, never before has the selection and careful manipulation of violent aesthetics been so heavily policed, in …

Peter and Mickey spend the hour speaking with author/educator Henry Giroux. Giroux explains the concept of ‘critical pedagogy,’ and the pivotal role that education plays for the whole of society. He warns of the increasing domination of the world by the ultra-rich, and a new form of anti-intellectualism fostered by a failing corporate media. Among the measures the left must take to resist these forces, he names the formation of a third political party, and more academics taking on the duties of public intellectuals, rather than limiting
their activities to the campus.